Monday, 19 March 2012

From the 1964 New York World's Fair.
The blacked out sequence is because a real model of a docking spacecraft in the theatre took over the action. Decades later and still no "monthly milk run".
But we do have pocket phones in Patagonia.

Thursday, 15 March 2012

Spacesuits can be so cumbersome, what with all that donning and doffing and trying not to die of explosive decompression, so why not cut out the middleman and just turn astronauts into cyborgs designed to survive in space as is?

I can think of a couple of reasons, but two come to the top of my list:

Wednesday, 14 March 2012

Tuesday, 13 March 2012

This 1925 vision of the city of the future always fascinated me. Why bother with one boring ground-level street system with an underground train at most leading off into the suburbs when you can turn a metropolis into one massive labyrinth of tunnels, warrens and terraces that no one ever leaves in their lives because everyone is hopelessly lost.

Thursday, 8 March 2012

Tales of Future Past has been up and running since 1 January 2004 and what started out as a three-week project expanded into an eight-year career that still sees no end in sight. Unfortunately, it's become something of a victim of its own success since the larger it gets the more maintenance it requires and the older it gets the more apparent it becomes that it will one day need a major revamp. All this makes it very hard to find the time and energy I'd like to add new material as fast as I'd like. Also, other people have taken up the banner of Future Past, starting blogs and sites dedicated to the same topic and they need to be exposed to a larger audience to do them justice.

With both of these problems in mind, I've decided to start a new blog as a companion to my other three (Ephemeral Isle,The Quill & The Keyboard and Reel Ranting) as well as to the main Tales of Future Past site where I can post material that will either be incorporated later into Tales of Future Past, miscellaneous stuff that doesn't quite fit into any of the TOFP sections and a gathering of Future Past news from around the Web as I stumble across it.

Since I'm already running three blogs and have to make this thing I like to call a "living", this won't be a daily blog, but more of what there is as I come across it, though I find quite a bit out there and I'll be cross posting Future Past items from Ephemeral Isle, so this won't exactly be filled with stale biscuits. However, I would recommend subscribing to the RSS feed to insure against missing anything.

Welcome to Tales of Future Past: The Blog

This is the companion blog to Tales of Future Past; the award-winning site dedicated to how the past saw the future. While TOFP tries to tell a coherent story, this blog is more of an on-going conversation. Here you'll find Future Past news, reports on other sites dedicated to the topics, postings of material that isn't yet found on TOFP and some experimental stuff.

This blog isn't updated daily, so to ensure that you don't miss anything, subscribe to our RSS feed.